Fast Metabolism Diet - What I Ate - Week 1

I think I read seven pages of reviews on Amazon before purchasing the Fast Metabolism Diet book. One of the most common complaints I read is that you have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking and that the recipes take forever.

I took that with a grain of salt. Being a food blogger means my idea of "a lot of time in the kitchen" doesn't exactly match up with the rest of the world. Honestly, it ended up taking me longer to figure out WHAT to eat than it ever did to make it. I spent 3 lunch hours and then an hour or so three more nights at home trying to figure out a menu that would work for Tom and I. Six hours of meal planning? I don't even spend that long planning out Thanksgiving or Christmas! I'm hoping that after a week it will get much easier to plan.

The short of the diet is that there are certain foods you can eat on certain days. Days 1 and 2 focus on carbs and include an insane amount of fruit that needs to be eaten. Days 3 and 4 are all about the protein. You eat protein and veggies and nothing else. Then days 5, 6 and 7 are about a balance of protein, carbs, fruit and healthy fats - basically how you should eat on a regular basis. You also eat within 30 minutes of waking up and you have at least 5 meals a day, 3 balanced full meals and two snacks.

I spent about 2 1/2 hours in the kitchen last Sunday doing prep work. Thirty minutes of that involved looking through all of the recipes to make sure that I had planned correctly. Another 30 minutes was spent running to the Dollar Tree and picking up 1-cup sized containers to easily portion out my food. (They're in 5 packs with green lids and I highly recommend them.)

The rest of the time was spent towards actual food prep -
Day 1 and 2:
- Cut up and portion out fruit
- Make steel cut oats
- slice up bell peppers, onions, broccoli and celery for both dinners
- remove 2 slices of sprouted bread from the freezer and place in the fridge (It can either be frozen or refrigerated and I have more room in the freezer, so I keep it in there.)
- cooked rice for both dinners
Day 3 and 4:
- baked egg whites
- sliced the bell peppers, onion and mushrooms for breakfast both days
- sauteed vegetables for breakfast both days
- chopped the celery, onion and cucumber for the tuna salad both days
- prepared the tuna salad
- sliced the bell peppers for Tuesday dinner
Unrelated:
- portioning out bulk chicken breast purchase
- portioning out bulk pork tenderloin purchase

I will say that this wasn't exactly cheap. I spent $20 in fruit, $26 in vegetables, $28 in deli meats, turkey bacon and canned tuna, $11 in sprouted bread and sprouted bagels, $26 for a pork roast, sirloin steaks and turkey sausage, and another $20-ish for almond butter, eggs, steel cut oats, rice, etc.

I am hoping the bread, bagels, oats, almond butter and rice will last for the whole 4 weeks. The pork loin will provide at least 1 day of leftovers, hopefully two, that I can freeze and eat the following week, but everything else was just enough for this first week. I am a little concerned with summer ending that I won't have enough fruits to eat on day 1 and 2 without spending an arm and a leg, but we'll see how that goes.

How it Went:
Monday - Since it was a holiday, I was home all day and didn't have any problems adhering to the eating within 30 minutes or waking up or eating every 3 hours. I felt full and did fine.Tuesday - I packed my breakfast and lunch, headed to work, pulled out the containers and found that I didn't bring the oatmeal. Seriously? So I went to Dunkin and got plain oatmeal, which is not the same as steel cut oats, but I hoped for the best. A migraine set in Tuesday night.Wednesday - the migraine was gone when I woke up but was back in full force by 10 am. I ate everything I had planned and spent the entire starving. For a diet that says you're supposed to eat frequently before you get hungry, this wasn't working. Fell asleep early with the migraine still there.Thursday - I added the turkey sausage from the previous dinner into my breakfast, upped the amount of deli meat and finally stopped feeling like my stomach was going to eat itself. The migraine was still persistently hanging on even through my prescription meds, so I caved and ate a bowl of light popcorn after dinner and immediately felt better.Friday - overall I know Friday is going to be the hardest each week. I don't have time at night to cook a full breakfast and lunch for that day and what I cook on the previous Sunday isn't good that long. I had a work meeting and ended up eating the ordered lunch. The deli meat wasn't likely nitrate free, but you can't win them all.Saturday - another hard day. I don't eat very much on the weekends and I hate cooking on my "days off" so this was a struggle to follow the schedule. I ended up missing the snack before dinner and instead had an earlier dinner and the snack later, which is acceptable on the meal plan.Sunday - same as Saturday, it's hard for me to eat at scheduled times on the weekend. I did have a tablespoon-sized bite of a pumpkin cupcake I made.
The Good: sprouted bread/bagels are a lot tastier than I expected. With the right amount of protein, no carb days aren't terrible. I'm patting myself on the back. I've drank 2,250 ml of water every single day.
The Bad: eating within 30 minutes of waking up is hard. I've been eating my snack instead of breakfast, but then I'm not following the three hour rule and I'm hungry within 90 minutes to 2 hours by doing that.Weight Loss: 4.2 pounds